The National Alliance on Mental Health estimates nearly 19 percent of adults experience mental illness in a given year. Between 26 and 46 percent of homeless adults live with mental illness.

Treating those individuals requires a certain kind of care.

The WSU College of Nursing includes several fields in nursing, from Bachelor of Science nurses who provide basic health care to nurse practitioners who have a master’s or doctorate. Both levels and in between are working with the homeless.

With their vision of true inter-professional education in mind, teaching faculty from medicine, nursing and pharmacy are spending many hours together designing the interior spaces and work flow plan for the soon-to-be-built University District Health Clinic.

On Spokane’s health sciences campus, where most of the departments complement each other, the University Programs in Communication Disorders (UPCD) is a unique case.

The UPCD partners—WSU’s Speech and Hearing Sciences (SHS) and EWU’s Communication Disorders programs— compete for undergraduate and graduate students who want to train to become speech-language pathologists and audiologists. But once the students are enrolled, they’re embraced by both institutions.

On her first day as the retired Dean of the WSU College of Nursing, Patricia Butterfield received an invitation from the White House to participate in a roundtable discussion on climate change and public health.

Under Butterfield’s leadership, the College of Nursing has had a focus on environmental health.

“As a public health nurse, I am pleased to see that the discussion around climate change has been connected to public health, and that our government recognizes the importance of this,” she said in a WSU news release. “If we aren’t taking care of the environment, we are not taking care of ourselves.”

The University District Health Clinic – which will allow health sciences students on the WSU Spokane campus to gain valuable work experience and be home to medical residencies – will celebrate its groundbreaking on May 6 at 9:00 a.m.

Governor Jay Inslee visited campus yesterday for an afternoon celebration of the start of WSU’s new medical school to be located in Spokane.

“We are all Cougs today,” he said shortly after taking the stage in front of a crowd of about 200.

Inslee signed legislation this week allowing WSU to operate a medical school. As the legislature continues its budget negotiations, we should soon learn the amount of funding WSU will receive. Both budget proposals have included money for WSU’s new medical school.

Governor Jay Inslee signed legislation today that allows WSU to operate a medical school in Spokane. This is a great day for WSU, Spokane and the entire state. As the Governor was signing, the audience around him broke out into a nice rendition of the WSU fight song – a fitting way to celebrate.

The legislation – officially House Bill 1559 – changes a 1917 law that restricted medical education solely to the University of Washington.